Longfellow's Readers

Laura Bridgman. Carte-de-visite, undated.

The tough Bridgman (who once bit Charles Sumner because he had squeezed her too hard) always refused to assume an agreeable pose for photographs. Later, she also discarded the green band that, like the other inmates of the Perkins Institution, she had kept wrapped around her eyes for years (and that visitor Charles Dickens noted she had also put on her doll).